The ride through the last part of the forest was uneventful.  Argan, kharob, and lotus, with the help of a few of the “arar” or gum sandarac trees, shut off the view to the right and left.  Below them dwarf-palm, aloe, cactus, and sweet broom made a dense undergrowth, and where the woodland opened suddenly the ground was aflame with flowers that recalled England as clearly as the cuckoo’s note.  Pimpernel, convolvulus, mignonette, marigold, and pansy were English enough, and in addition to these the ox-daisies of our meadows were almost as common here.  Many companies of the true Bedouins passed us on the road, heralded by great flocks of sheep and goats, the sheep pausing to eat the tops of the dwarf-palms, the goats to climb the low-lying argan trees, while their owners stayed to ask about the water supply and the state of the country beyond.

Though we might consider ourselves far removed from civilisation, these Bedouins felt that they were all too near it.  The change from their desert land, with its few and far-scattered oases, to this country where there was a douar at the end of every day’s journey, was like a change from the country to the town.  They could not view without concern a part of the world in which men wore several garments, ate bread and vegetables, and slept under cover in a walled village, and one wild fellow, who carried a very old flint-lock musket, lamented the drought that had forced them from their homes to a place so full of men.  So far as I was able to observe the matter, the Berber muleteers of El Arbi bel Hadj ben Haidah looked with great scorn upon these Bedouins, and their contempt was reciprocated.  In the eyes of the Berbers these men were outcasts and “eaters of sand,” and in the eyes of the Bedouins the muleteers were puling, town-bred slaves, who dared not say their right hands were their own.

Perhaps the difficulty in the way of a proper understanding was largely physical.  The Berbers believe they came to Morocco from Canaan, forced out of Palestine by the movement of the Jews under Joshua.  They settled in the mountains of the “Far West,” and have never been absorbed or driven out by their Arab conquerors.  Strong, sturdy, temperate men, devoid of imagination, and of the impulse to create or develop an artistic side to their lives, they can have nothing in common with the slenderly built, far-seeing Arab of the plains, who dreams dreams and sees visions all the days of his life.  Between Salam and the Bedouins, on the other hand, good feeling came naturally.  The poor travellers, whose worldly wealth was ever in their sight—­a camel or two, a tent with scanty furniture, and a few goats and sheep—­had all the unexplored places of the world to wander in, and all the heavens for their canopy.  That is the life the Arabs love, and it had tempted Salam many hundreds of miles from his native place, the sacred city of Sheshawan, on the border of Er-Riff.  The wandering instinct is never very far from any of us who have once passed east of Suez, and learned that the highest end and aim of life is not to live in a town, however large and ugly, and suffer without complaining the inevitable visits of the tax collector.